>A creature like that would go extinct pretty quickly but it would sure be convenient to have one
Which would mean that human action would protect its species, redefining what 'evolutionary fitness' means in this context. Same thing with our normal domesticates.
But, like the example of the testicles, intelligent design can get around the problem of *local* maximas (maximums? maxiae? whatever.) Things like how our eyes are built inside-out - the support infrastructure (blood vessels, nerves, etc.) is on top of the photo-sensing cells. Or how our larynax nerve is wrapped around the aorta, so that it has to go deep into the chest before going back up to the throat. Mutation-based evolution can't fix these problems because they're irreducibly complex. I'm not sure what genes controls these things, but there is probably at lest two of them, and they *all* would have to be 'fixed' in the same generation. Otherwise, the organism would just be blind or be able to talk. You'd also have backwards comparability issues - if we ever getting around to fixing these things, that'll almost certainly be a speciation event. The 'bug-fixed' population wouldn't be able to breed with baseline humans anymore.
Your super-car-organism won't happen naturally not because of it not being evolutionary fit (something so useful would certainly be protected by humans, and be well fitted to both their market niche and their environmental niche), but because its too far away from the local maximas that exist in nature. There aren't any large organisms with wheels, let alone ones with chlorophyll.
Mycoplasma genitalium, a genetically minimal bacterium that's being used as a model for synthetic life, has 580,000 base pairs. The linux kernel I have running on my machine is 1,764,280 bytes. 4^580,000 is approx. 6.24 x 10^349194. 2^1,764,280 is approx. 1.59 x 10^531101. It looks like vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic holds quite a bit more data than the Mycoplasma genitalium genome - and *it's* compressed. The linux kernel is actually more complicated than some lifeforms.
Of course, the human genome is another matter - 3 billion base pairs.
I hope by the time we start tweaking the human genome seriously we will have figured out how to upload and download brain states. Could you imagine having to live with a beta-test genome for the rest of your life? Fortunately these guys are working on bacteria. Multicellular organisms are bit more difficult to work with - they have to unfold from a single cell, and the other cells have to tell each cell what to do. It's an emergent process, and there is a lot of room for little mistakes to become big mistakes. I get the impression that it's going to be like programing for parallel processing vs. programing for a single processor, only much more difficult. The human mind, despite running on highly parallelized hardware, can't handle parallelization well.
1) DNA and RNA exist today. 2) They can decompose into simpler chemicals. 3) Each of the decomposition reactions are reversible.
Therefore the probability of simpler chemicals coming together and forming nucleic acids is not zero.
Of course, that *is* like saying that since your room is clean, it can become messy, and that each of the actions that caused it to become messy are reversible, therefore your room could spontaneously clean itself... But see my post below about how those odds can be cut down.
On the Wikipedia article on 'RNA world hypothesis,' it says Joan Oro demonstrated that (at least some) nucleotides could be synthesized abiotically. It does say in the next section that process that Oro used to synthesize nucleotides is incompatible with the synthesis of sugars, but that's not referenced, so who knows if that's right or not. (I certainly don't.)
If there was some prebiotic mechanism for pumping out sugars and nucleotides, then the chances of 6-base strands forming go up a lot. Oro demonstrated one way, there might be others. Since I'm not a chemist, I have no idea of the chances of these strands forming spontaneously, given a sufficiently rich soup of sugars and nucleotides, but it doesn't sound too improbable.
At this point, this newly discovered liquid crystal effect comes into play. According to the Wikipedia article, one of the problems with the RNA world hypothesis is that RNA would get terminated if a nucleotide of the wrong chilarity joined. Nucleotides and other amino-acids come in right-hand and left-hand forms. A growing RNA strand needs to be made out of nucleotides of the same handedness, or chilarity. Since AFIACT, there's a 50/50 shot of what chilarity an abiotically produced nucleotide would be, there would be a very good chance that an abiotic RNA strand would get terminated by a nucleotide of the wrong chilarity early in the game. This liquid crystal effect would tend to select for longer RNA strands, which would help to counteract the chilarity termination problem. This is assuming that this liquid crystal effect works on RNA as well as DNA, but it looks like it should work on any nucleic acid.
With long strands of RNA, the chances of one of those strands doing something useful (RNA can work as a protein) go up. If you can get a strain of RNA that self-replicates, then you have a very simple form of life and evolution comes into play.
This liquid crystal effect gives what might be called an island of stability. Finding out ways that amino-acids, nucleotides, sugars, and other simple biochemical building blocks could have been synthesized abiotically provide other islands of stability. With each island of stability we discover, life arising from non-living chemicals becomes less improbable. It's the difference between having to dial every possible combination into a combination lock and being able to listen for a 'click' when each tumbler hits the right digit.
CIA agents *especially* need hugs. Poor bastards, all their successes are classified, and all their mistakes are front page news. As for the ones that run secret prisons and hand out the torture, well, torturers probably need hugs too.
That sounds a lot like Steve Jobs except for the closed eyes and rocking back and forth. Which sounds a lot like Asperger's. Maybe there is some truth to the rumors?
There are many of us that feel that there is a moral issue that needs to be addressed. What inherent right do we have to perform painful experiments on other life forms? The savage truth is that we have no such right. We get away with it because the life forms we hurt in the process are helpless. To some extent, I agree with this. We evolved a sense of fairness because if we harm someone, they and their friends will harm us down the road. If we help someone, then they and theirs will help us down the road. (See Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma) But this only applies to "people," i.e., people we are likely to meet down the road, or people whose relatives we are likely to meet down the road, or whose relatives' relatives... According the Jared Diamond, back in the hunter-gather days, "people" only included immediate family, out to the 1st cousin, and their mates. As population density went up, our definition of "people" expanded.
Government got started when some dude with a big stick went up to a bunch of farmers and said "Give me all your food and nobody gets hurt." Democracy doesn't work because of a social contract (when did *you* ratify the Constitution?) but because democracy is fairly good at creating a government that doesn't piss people off enough to revolt. (The Dude With The Big Stick has a partial monopoly on force. He can take on any single actor. But he isn't strong enough to take on everyone at once, or even a large and powerful faction.) All forms of government rule on the sufferance of the population. Democracy just allows us to kick the bums out short of a revolution.
Rights exist, not because they are natural or God-given, but because they are concessions we have extracted from the Dude With The Big Stick. In a way, the first step to receiving a right is to demand it, or to have someone demand it on your behalf. And if someone does demand something on someone else's behalf, then that someone would have to accept you as "people."
Chimps don't understand our ways enough to demand their rights. If they get rights, it will only be because enough people demanded rights on their behalf that they managed to get it to stick.
Should Chimps have rights? I don't know. I don't know if "should" exists, objectively speaking. "Should" is a social fact, not a physical one. Work it out amongst yourselves.
More like the ones not using coyotes because they can't afford them. If 1) We charge $5000, 2) Coyotes now charge $3000, and 3)This plan did put the coyotes out of business, then, yes, some of the people now using coyotes would be blocked from entering the country, either because they could afford $3000 but not $5000 or because they couldn't pass the background check. But on the whole, the $5000 cover charge would be excluding mostly those who are already excluded - most of the coyotes' current customers would be able to get in completely legit. However, this is better than two other alternatives - opening the floodgates entirely or keep doing what we're doing which means keeping the coyotes employed and our borders nice and porous.
Well, the real reason I put the price at $5000 *is* to keep out the riff-raff. (In order to keep immigrants from competing with our existing citizens for jobs.) Much more than that, and you'll once again create a market for the coyotes. Instead of basing the charge on how much the immigrants are costing us (and I'm not personally sure that they are), we need to base the charge on how much the traffic will bear - and not a penny more.
>>Look, I have friends at Microsoft and there are truly some brilliant folks up there, but what the hell is the marketing department doing? Are they *that* ethically challenged? Or is it that they are *that* desperate to be cool and loved? How about a policy of honesty and if there is something that you want, then why not have your Microsoft PR department make the edits? Is that too obvious? It would certainly present other ethical dilemmas, but at least it would be more honest than hiring supposed "impartial" third parties to do your work for you.
Actually, I think there is a Wikipedia guideline that says it's a bad idea for people to edit their own biographies. (I heard about it because there was a flap over Jimbo editing his bio, contravening the guideline.) Something similar probably applies to corporations. In light of this guideline, it seems to me that what MS is doing actually does resemble ethical behavior. I don't know if this particular "consultant" or whatever you want to call him is "impartial" or not, or even if he is, if MS's other Wikipedia consultants are. But come on, this is the Wikipedia we're talking about here! Impartiality is not exactly a requirement for contributing to the Wikipedia.
I suppose a lot depends on how much actual editorial control MS exercises over these consultants. Hopefully, these consultant are friendly or at least not actively hostile towards MS (otherwise MS probably wouldn't pay them), but they might be less likely to just follow the company line than actual PR suits or other MS employees, which means that they're free to compromise with other contributors who are a bit less friendly. If that's the case, then they might fit into the Wikipedia community all right. The regular contributors should be able to keep them in check - especially if the consultants reveal themselves as such.
I think this might be okay, provided that both MS and these "consultants" give full disclosure - MS should publish a list of the people they are hiring as Wikipedia consultants, and the consultants should 'fess up on their userpages.
Quite frankly, I've been wondering how long it would take a corp to come up with something like this. It seems to me that they don't really have too much of a choice. If an article gets something wrong about your company, what can you do? You can sue the Wikipedia for libel, but who do you sue? You could sue the Wikimedia Foundation, but they don't have any real editorial control so you're not getting to the source of the problem. Plus you annoy the Wikipedia community into creating a perfectly factual but quite negative article to replace the libelous one. You could go after the individual contributor who first inserted the libelous claim, but that could take a while to track down, you can't get blood from such a small turnip, and you probably look like even more of a bully than if you went after Wikimedia. You can take matters into your own hands and edit the article yourself, but that gets you accused of astroturfing. It seems to me that getting a friendly but independent third party - with full disclosure all around - to intervene might be the least of the possible evils here.
>>The military was forced to wear kid gloves in their efforts in Iraq so as not to offend the sensibilities of simpering cowards at home. We should've been nailing people to crosses and leveling entire cities in the Sunni Triangle from day one, then we wouldn't have this insurgency mess that's still killing our men and women today.
Yes, that would serve our mission to remove a blood-thirsty tyrant quite well.
Well, there's my personal solution to the American immigration problem, perhaps it will work for you:
1) A lot of people, many of them living just south of the border, want into America *real* bad.
2)They are willing to pay "coyotes" a lot of money (about $3000 is the going rate, so I hear) to get into the country.
3) The coyotes, as long as they are heading that way, can smuggle in other things as well - drugs for sure, and perhaps terrorists, since they aren't going to be exactly careful about checking peoples' IDs.
4) Meanwhile, in order to get into the country legally, you have to add your name to a list. This list is taken care of on a first-come-first-served basis. And INS or ICE or whatever they're calling it this week are taking care of cases slower than new cases are being added. The wait period is currently at about 12 years and getting longer.
So, here's my solution: $5000 on the barrel-head, and a background check, and you're in. If the agency that does the background check doesn't get back to you within a year, you're in anyway. No "guest-worker" status, no "green card," just plain Jane legal residence. Short term student or tourist visas go cheaper. That $5000 goes part of the way towards covering the alleged drain on our taxpayer dollars that immigrants supposedly have, and the background check helps to make sure they ain't a terrorist. Since $5000 not only gets you in, but also gets you legal residence, I think most immigrants would rather pay for that than for $3000 for *illegal* residence. You chop out the market for coyotes, so suddenly our borders become a lot more secure. The $5000 cover charge might also tend to keep out some of the "riffraff." The strongest objection to this idea of mine that I've heard is that it might cause some loan-sharking to develop. However, 1) somehow I get the felling that coyotes might not be above some sharking as well, and 2) we have laws against loan-sharking. *Enforce them!*
>>The means might be sacrificing the purported objectivity of Wikipedia.
>>I'm not saying this will happen, but will Wikipedia cave to the presure of sponsors wanting to keep harmful information from Wikipedia?
Remember that "the Wikipedia" is really a collection of various weirdos who like to spend their free time writing encyclopedia articles for free. That and ideologues of every possible kind. Imagine Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Joe Stalin, Karl Marx, John Lennon, and Gandhi collaborating on an article on Communism, and you might get some idea of what some of the rougher parts of the Wikipedia are like. Getting the Wikipedians to toe any corporate line would be next to impossible. It's hard enough to keep them from killing each other! I'm more worried about corporate e-goons laying down astroturf then I am about Wikipedians being influenced by corporate sponsors. Sponsors trying to lean on the 'pedia would probably cause a backlash that would leave their article more anti- than it was to begin with. Astroturfers are a bit more stealthy.
I'd also be more worried that users would interpret ads as Wikipedia's endorsement of the product. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see what Google Ads decides to put on various article pages, and anybody who has flawed critical thinking skills probably shouldn't be using the Wikipedia as a source anyway. I think I'd be in favor of advertising, provided that the ads are unobtrusive and that the community has input on what the funds go for. In order to keep it unobtrusive, I'd suggest loading the adds last for the sake of people with slow connections and giving logged-in contributors the ability to switch off the adds.
I don't see this technology as an alternative to bookstores and libraries so much as an alternative to interlibrary loans, order books through a bookstore or through Amazon. Notice that they are planning on setting these up in bookstores and libraries, so obviously bookstores and libraries don't see this as a threat to their business. If the book you want is already there at the bookstore or library, no wait. But if it isn't there, instead of waiting days or weeks for your book to arrive, you only have to wait 7 minutes. If you're lucky enough to be doing this at one of those big chain bookstores, that's just enough time to enjoy a nice cup of coffee.
As far as only being able to get books that are out of copyright, that'll only last until the publishers catch on (assuming that this technology also catches on). Publishers will no longer have to worry about making huge number of books, hoping that enough sell to at least recoup their loses - a big win for them.
I could see how this might work in libraries as well. Imagine a library starting out as just a large building full of empty shelves and one (or more) of these machines. The first patron prints out a book and brings it back to the library. It goes on the shelf. Every patron sees if the book the want is already on the shelves. If not, they print it out. When the library runs out of shelf space, it takes the least checked-out books off to the recyclers, and they get turned back into feedstock for the book machine.
The library knows that every single book in their building has at least one person who wanted to read it. They also know that nobody left the building disappointed at not finding their book. They could even combine their "business" with that of a library, and sell books to people who don't want to return them, just like Blockbusters is doing with movies.
Or from poor, hardworking, underpaid, struggling copyright holders like Michael Jackson, who actually holds the rights to about half of the Beatles' songs.
It also looks like he has shades of Max Weber's "Protestant Work Ethic" in there. I'm a bit skeptical of that idea as well. Weber said essentially that Calvinism saw wealth as a sign of divine grace, so Calvininst nations placed a greater emphasis on capital deepening than Catholic countries. However, I remember reading one economist who said that the industrial revolution had more to do with technological advances than with capital deepening. Why technological advances happened in the countries they did might bear some investigating, granted. But it might also be worthwhile to look at the actual economic situations, independent of religions.
Well, at any rate, it is a bit jarring to see that mixed in with the "stimulating northern climate" meme. I'm not entirely sure that Weber himself would buy into that one.
I wouldn't call the traditional Inuit society democratic so much as egalitarian. This is true of most nomadic cultures. It's a bit tough to lord it over everybody else when your belongings are limited to what you can lug around. Which would you say is a more "democratic" culture - the Inuit or the Maasai? (It's difficult to imagine a culture more "southern" than the Maasi...)
No, I wouldn't accuse Jared Diamond of this sort of thinking. Arnold J. Toynbee did have something like that - IIRC, he believed that cultures from colder climates (Northern Europe, for example) were more advanced than cultures elsewhere because they had to develop technologies to deal with the harsher climate. Most modern historians/social scientists, etc., disagree with him rather strongly, but at least it was an alternative to some more racist views his contemporaries were spewing.
What Diamond does is explain why certain cultures - namely, those from the entire Eurasia super-continent - had a major leg-up over cultures elsewhere. The answer turns out to be that Eurasia had greater access to domesticatable crops and animals, plus Eurasia's major axis is east-west, which made diffusion of crops much easier than in the Americas or Africa, whose major axes are north-south. This allowed civilization (defined as a city-building culture, which in turn implies a society that can produce enough food surplus to support a non-food producing urban elite) to develop sooner and spread faster in Eurasia than on other continents. Diamond's account is a lot more plausible than Toynbee's.
However, Diamond's theory is not sufficient to explain the modern-day diffusion of the notion of the separation of church and state or democracy. For that, you have to look at how the concepts developed historically. I would suggest looking at the Thirty Years War and the revolution in military affairs caused by the development of firearms.
Actually, IIRC, the (pre-Christian) Romans had a bit of ulterior motive in providing for local autonomy in religious matters - namely, they didn't want to piss off the local gods. One of the reasons that Christians were persecuted against is that Christian soldiers wouldn't worship the local gods, which the other soldiers saw as bad luck.
I'm afraid I don't have any sources for this, this is just something I heard somewhere.
The GP mentioned users who *visted* the Wikipedia, not edited, but editing might be more incriminating as well as easier to track. Tracking down the IP address would be the easiest way to do such snooping automagically, but there are probably clues to be gleaned from the information the contributor adds to the 'pedia themselves...
A thought occurs - the Wikipedia is a fairly well known site, like CNN, New York Times, etc. Unlike many blocked and well known news and politics sites, the content is created by the users. If the Wikipedia is blocked by the PRC, then the Chinese langauge version is being edited by Chinese speakers (or writer, rather) from outside of the PRC, and those in the PRC that have managed to break through the Great Firewall. The resulting content would probably not be too favorable to the PRC.
Unblocking the Wikipedia would allow PRC loyalists to edit, improving the PRC's image, as well as providing the government an opportunity to conduct "counter-intelligence" on those who aren't so loyal.
Well, AFAICT, it goes back before Israel, but not before the Zionist movement. It started a bit after WWI. Before WWI, you had some Zionists moving to Palestine. They'd buy their land fair and square off of some absentee landlords who lived in Damascus, and, on the whole, they seem to have gotten on well with the locals. After WWI, though, there was a major influx of Zionists from Europe, and these new guys didn't know the lay of the land as well as the old hands. The main sticking point was the olive trees.
You see, you have these olive trees in Israel/Palestine. They can produce fruit for thousands of years, so they are really quite valuable. Because they are so valuable, the landlords in Damascus owned the land, but the local Palestinians owned the actual olive trees. The new arrivals didn't know this. The olive trees were in the way. So the noobs cut them down. Things kinda spiralled downward after that...
The game does look kinda cool. Wish I had time to play it.
Again, NK doesn't need nukes to completely ruin South Korea's day. The main targets for these nukes are Japan and, if they can, the US (San Francisco). By the time we mobilize to bomb them (assuming we don't do a pre-emptive strike), there will hardly be any targets in South Korea worth nuking. Well, maybe in the southern part, I don't know... (Come on, this is slashdot, I'm talking out my nether regions here.) Given that North Korea can't have more of a handful of nukes, I'd would say that they would committ them all in the initial attack. They probably have the launch facilities to get them all into the air (or at least explode on the launch pad), but given the reliability of the NK's missles, they might not all get to the target.
So, after the initial attack, we'll be dealing with conventional weapons. Going across the DMZ will be a bit tough. Somebody mentioned an amphib assault, but North Korea does have a respectable submarine fleet. On the other hand, their air force is a joke. With in a very short time, we will own the air to the point where a "fighter bomber with a one way ticket" is going to have a hard time getting off the ground. Air power alone won't be enough to win the war, but it will at least keep the North Koreans pre-occupied while we work on the ground war. As for the ground war, well, to put it bluntly, just about any problem is shallow if you throw enough resources (i.e. bodies) at it, and we will also have help from the Chinese. The only question in my mind is that, if this plays out, if we will need to go to a draft, or if our standing forces can handle it before the draftees can mobilize.
As for North Korea being nuts, well, there's nuts and then there's nuts. It's pretty clear that Kim wants nukes as a deterrent against an American invasion, and also to show that he's a world-class player too. If he actually uses them, he's toast. End of problem. The most scary thing is if he sells them to someone else, but given that he probably doesn't have too many of them, he probably won't want to.
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>A creature like that would go extinct pretty quickly but it would sure be convenient to have one
Which would mean that human action would protect its species, redefining what 'evolutionary fitness' means in this context. Same thing with our normal domesticates.
But, like the example of the testicles, intelligent design can get around the problem of *local* maximas (maximums? maxiae? whatever.) Things like how our eyes are built inside-out - the support infrastructure (blood vessels, nerves, etc.) is on top of the photo-sensing cells. Or how our larynax nerve is wrapped around the aorta, so that it has to go deep into the chest before going back up to the throat. Mutation-based evolution can't fix these problems because they're irreducibly complex. I'm not sure what genes controls these things, but there is probably at lest two of them, and they *all* would have to be 'fixed' in the same generation. Otherwise, the organism would just be blind or be able to talk. You'd also have backwards comparability issues - if we ever getting around to fixing these things, that'll almost certainly be a speciation event. The 'bug-fixed' population wouldn't be able to breed with baseline humans anymore.
Your super-car-organism won't happen naturally not because of it not being evolutionary fit (something so useful would certainly be protected by humans, and be well fitted to both their market niche and their environmental niche), but because its too far away from the local maximas that exist in nature. There aren't any large organisms with wheels, let alone ones with chlorophyll.
Mycoplasma genitalium, a genetically minimal bacterium that's being used as a model for synthetic life, has 580,000 base pairs. The linux kernel I have running on my machine is 1,764,280 bytes. 4^580,000 is approx. 6.24 x 10^349194. 2^1,764,280 is approx. 1.59 x 10^531101. It looks like vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic holds quite a bit more data than the Mycoplasma genitalium genome - and *it's* compressed. The linux kernel is actually more complicated than some lifeforms.
Of course, the human genome is another matter - 3 billion base pairs.
I hope by the time we start tweaking the human genome seriously we will have figured out how to upload and download brain states. Could you imagine having to live with a beta-test genome for the rest of your life? Fortunately these guys are working on bacteria. Multicellular organisms are bit more difficult to work with - they have to unfold from a single cell, and the other cells have to tell each cell what to do. It's an emergent process, and there is a lot of room for little mistakes to become big mistakes. I get the impression that it's going to be like programing for parallel processing vs. programing for a single processor, only much more difficult. The human mind, despite running on highly parallelized hardware, can't handle parallelization well.
1) DNA and RNA exist today.
2) They can decompose into simpler chemicals.
3) Each of the decomposition reactions are reversible.
Therefore the probability of simpler chemicals coming together and forming nucleic acids is not zero.
Of course, that *is* like saying that since your room is clean, it can become messy, and that each of the actions that caused it to become messy are reversible, therefore your room could spontaneously clean itself... But see my post below about how those odds can be cut down.
On the Wikipedia article on 'RNA world hypothesis,' it says Joan Oro demonstrated that (at least some) nucleotides could be synthesized abiotically. It does say in the next section that process that Oro used to synthesize nucleotides is incompatible with the synthesis of sugars, but that's not referenced, so who knows if that's right or not. (I certainly don't.)
If there was some prebiotic mechanism for pumping out sugars and nucleotides, then the chances of 6-base strands forming go up a lot. Oro demonstrated one way, there might be others. Since I'm not a chemist, I have no idea of the chances of these strands forming spontaneously, given a sufficiently rich soup of sugars and nucleotides, but it doesn't sound too improbable.
At this point, this newly discovered liquid crystal effect comes into play. According to the Wikipedia article, one of the problems with the RNA world hypothesis is that RNA would get terminated if a nucleotide of the wrong chilarity joined. Nucleotides and other amino-acids come in right-hand and left-hand forms. A growing RNA strand needs to be made out of nucleotides of the same handedness, or chilarity. Since AFIACT, there's a 50/50 shot of what chilarity an abiotically produced nucleotide would be, there would be a very good chance that an abiotic RNA strand would get terminated by a nucleotide of the wrong chilarity early in the game. This liquid crystal effect would tend to select for longer RNA strands, which would help to counteract the chilarity termination problem. This is assuming that this liquid crystal effect works on RNA as well as DNA, but it looks like it should work on any nucleic acid.
With long strands of RNA, the chances of one of those strands doing something useful (RNA can work as a protein) go up. If you can get a strain of RNA that self-replicates, then you have a very simple form of life and evolution comes into play.
This liquid crystal effect gives what might be called an island of stability. Finding out ways that amino-acids, nucleotides, sugars, and other simple biochemical building blocks could have been synthesized abiotically provide other islands of stability. With each island of stability we discover, life arising from non-living chemicals becomes less improbable. It's the difference between having to dial every possible combination into a combination lock and being able to listen for a 'click' when each tumbler hits the right digit.
CIA agents *especially* need hugs. Poor bastards, all their successes are classified, and all their mistakes are front page news. As for the ones that run secret prisons and hand out the torture, well, torturers probably need hugs too.
Government got started when some dude with a big stick went up to a bunch of farmers and said "Give me all your food and nobody gets hurt." Democracy doesn't work because of a social contract (when did *you* ratify the Constitution?) but because democracy is fairly good at creating a government that doesn't piss people off enough to revolt. (The Dude With The Big Stick has a partial monopoly on force. He can take on any single actor. But he isn't strong enough to take on everyone at once, or even a large and powerful faction.) All forms of government rule on the sufferance of the population. Democracy just allows us to kick the bums out short of a revolution.
Rights exist, not because they are natural or God-given, but because they are concessions we have extracted from the Dude With The Big Stick. In a way, the first step to receiving a right is to demand it, or to have someone demand it on your behalf. And if someone does demand something on someone else's behalf, then that someone would have to accept you as "people."
Chimps don't understand our ways enough to demand their rights. If they get rights, it will only be because enough people demanded rights on their behalf that they managed to get it to stick.
Should Chimps have rights? I don't know. I don't know if "should" exists, objectively speaking. "Should" is a social fact, not a physical one. Work it out amongst yourselves.
Yeah, that'd mean that Bill could run again...
More like the ones not using coyotes because they can't afford them. If 1) We charge $5000, 2) Coyotes now charge $3000, and 3)This plan did put the coyotes out of business, then, yes, some of the people now using coyotes would be blocked from entering the country, either because they could afford $3000 but not $5000 or because they couldn't pass the background check. But on the whole, the $5000 cover charge would be excluding mostly those who are already excluded - most of the coyotes' current customers would be able to get in completely legit. However, this is better than two other alternatives - opening the floodgates entirely or keep doing what we're doing which means keeping the coyotes employed and our borders nice and porous.
Well, the real reason I put the price at $5000 *is* to keep out the riff-raff. (In order to keep immigrants from competing with our existing citizens for jobs.) Much more than that, and you'll once again create a market for the coyotes. Instead of basing the charge on how much the immigrants are costing us (and I'm not personally sure that they are), we need to base the charge on how much the traffic will bear - and not a penny more.
>>Look, I have friends at Microsoft and there are truly some brilliant folks up there, but what the hell is the marketing department doing? Are they *that* ethically challenged? Or is it that they are *that* desperate to be cool and loved? How about a policy of honesty and if there is something that you want, then why not have your Microsoft PR department make the edits? Is that too obvious? It would certainly present other ethical dilemmas, but at least it would be more honest than hiring supposed "impartial" third parties to do your work for you.
Actually, I think there is a Wikipedia guideline that says it's a bad idea for people to edit their own biographies. (I heard about it because there was a flap over Jimbo editing his bio, contravening the guideline.) Something similar probably applies to corporations. In light of this guideline, it seems to me that what MS is doing actually does resemble ethical behavior. I don't know if this particular "consultant" or whatever you want to call him is "impartial" or not, or even if he is, if MS's other Wikipedia consultants are. But come on, this is the Wikipedia we're talking about here! Impartiality is not exactly a requirement for contributing to the Wikipedia.
I suppose a lot depends on how much actual editorial control MS exercises over these consultants. Hopefully, these consultant are friendly or at least not actively hostile towards MS (otherwise MS probably wouldn't pay them), but they might be less likely to just follow the company line than actual PR suits or other MS employees, which means that they're free to compromise with other contributors who are a bit less friendly. If that's the case, then they might fit into the Wikipedia community all right. The regular contributors should be able to keep them in check - especially if the consultants reveal themselves as such.
I think this might be okay, provided that both MS and these "consultants" give full disclosure - MS should publish a list of the people they are hiring as Wikipedia consultants, and the consultants should 'fess up on their userpages.
Quite frankly, I've been wondering how long it would take a corp to come up with something like this. It seems to me that they don't really have too much of a choice. If an article gets something wrong about your company, what can you do? You can sue the Wikipedia for libel, but who do you sue? You could sue the Wikimedia Foundation, but they don't have any real editorial control so you're not getting to the source of the problem. Plus you annoy the Wikipedia community into creating a perfectly factual but quite negative article to replace the libelous one. You could go after the individual contributor who first inserted the libelous claim, but that could take a while to track down, you can't get blood from such a small turnip, and you probably look like even more of a bully than if you went after Wikimedia. You can take matters into your own hands and edit the article yourself, but that gets you accused of astroturfing. It seems to me that getting a friendly but independent third party - with full disclosure all around - to intervene might be the least of the possible evils here.
>>The military was forced to wear kid gloves in their efforts in Iraq so as not to offend the sensibilities of simpering cowards at home. We should've been nailing people to crosses and leveling entire cities in the Sunni Triangle from day one, then we wouldn't have this insurgency mess that's still killing our men and women today. Yes, that would serve our mission to remove a blood-thirsty tyrant quite well.
Well, there's my personal solution to the American immigration problem, perhaps it will work for you:
1) A lot of people, many of them living just south of the border, want into America *real* bad.
2)They are willing to pay "coyotes" a lot of money (about $3000 is the going rate, so I hear) to get into the country.
3) The coyotes, as long as they are heading that way, can smuggle in other things as well - drugs for sure, and perhaps terrorists, since they aren't going to be exactly careful about checking peoples' IDs.
4) Meanwhile, in order to get into the country legally, you have to add your name to a list. This list is taken care of on a first-come-first-served basis. And INS or ICE or whatever they're calling it this week are taking care of cases slower than new cases are being added. The wait period is currently at about 12 years and getting longer.
So, here's my solution: $5000 on the barrel-head, and a background check, and you're in. If the agency that does the background check doesn't get back to you within a year, you're in anyway. No "guest-worker" status, no "green card," just plain Jane legal residence. Short term student or tourist visas go cheaper. That $5000 goes part of the way towards covering the alleged drain on our taxpayer dollars that immigrants supposedly have, and the background check helps to make sure they ain't a terrorist. Since $5000 not only gets you in, but also gets you legal residence, I think most immigrants would rather pay for that than for $3000 for *illegal* residence. You chop out the market for coyotes, so suddenly our borders become a lot more secure. The $5000 cover charge might also tend to keep out some of the "riffraff." The strongest objection to this idea of mine that I've heard is that it might cause some loan-sharking to develop. However, 1) somehow I get the felling that coyotes might not be above some sharking as well, and 2) we have laws against loan-sharking. *Enforce them!*
Any other constructive criticism?
>>The means might be sacrificing the purported objectivity of Wikipedia.
>>I'm not saying this will happen, but will Wikipedia cave to the presure of sponsors wanting to keep harmful information from Wikipedia?
Remember that "the Wikipedia" is really a collection of various weirdos who like to spend their free time writing encyclopedia articles for free. That and ideologues of every possible kind. Imagine Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Joe Stalin, Karl Marx, John Lennon, and Gandhi collaborating on an article on Communism, and you might get some idea of what some of the rougher parts of the Wikipedia are like. Getting the Wikipedians to toe any corporate line would be next to impossible. It's hard enough to keep them from killing each other! I'm more worried about corporate e-goons laying down astroturf then I am about Wikipedians being influenced by corporate sponsors. Sponsors trying to lean on the 'pedia would probably cause a backlash that would leave their article more anti- than it was to begin with. Astroturfers are a bit more stealthy.
I'd also be more worried that users would interpret ads as Wikipedia's endorsement of the product. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see what Google Ads decides to put on various article pages, and anybody who has flawed critical thinking skills probably shouldn't be using the Wikipedia as a source anyway. I think I'd be in favor of advertising, provided that the ads are unobtrusive and that the community has input on what the funds go for. In order to keep it unobtrusive, I'd suggest loading the adds last for the sake of people with slow connections and giving logged-in contributors the ability to switch off the adds.
I don't see this technology as an alternative to bookstores and libraries so much as an alternative to interlibrary loans, order books through a bookstore or through Amazon. Notice that they are planning on setting these up in bookstores and libraries, so obviously bookstores and libraries don't see this as a threat to their business. If the book you want is already there at the bookstore or library, no wait. But if it isn't there, instead of waiting days or weeks for your book to arrive, you only have to wait 7 minutes. If you're lucky enough to be doing this at one of those big chain bookstores, that's just enough time to enjoy a nice cup of coffee.
As far as only being able to get books that are out of copyright, that'll only last until the publishers catch on (assuming that this technology also catches on). Publishers will no longer have to worry about making huge number of books, hoping that enough sell to at least recoup their loses - a big win for them.
I could see how this might work in libraries as well. Imagine a library starting out as just a large building full of empty shelves and one (or more) of these machines. The first patron prints out a book and brings it back to the library. It goes on the shelf. Every patron sees if the book the want is already on the shelves. If not, they print it out. When the library runs out of shelf space, it takes the least checked-out books off to the recyclers, and they get turned back into feedstock for the book machine.
The library knows that every single book in their building has at least one person who wanted to read it. They also know that nobody left the building disappointed at not finding their book. They could even combine their "business" with that of a library, and sell books to people who don't want to return them, just like Blockbusters is doing with movies.
Or from poor, hardworking, underpaid, struggling copyright holders like Michael Jackson, who actually holds the rights to about half of the Beatles' songs.
Just out of curiosity, who had the worst effect on Iraqi life expectancy? Saddam or us? It really frightens me that I don't know this.
It also looks like he has shades of Max Weber's "Protestant Work Ethic" in there. I'm a bit skeptical of that idea as well. Weber said essentially that Calvinism saw wealth as a sign of divine grace, so Calvininst nations placed a greater emphasis on capital deepening than Catholic countries. However, I remember reading one economist who said that the industrial revolution had more to do with technological advances than with capital deepening. Why technological advances happened in the countries they did might bear some investigating, granted. But it might also be worthwhile to look at the actual economic situations, independent of religions. Well, at any rate, it is a bit jarring to see that mixed in with the "stimulating northern climate" meme. I'm not entirely sure that Weber himself would buy into that one.
I wouldn't call the traditional Inuit society democratic so much as egalitarian. This is true of most nomadic cultures. It's a bit tough to lord it over everybody else when your belongings are limited to what you can lug around. Which would you say is a more "democratic" culture - the Inuit or the Maasai? (It's difficult to imagine a culture more "southern" than the Maasi...)
No, I wouldn't accuse Jared Diamond of this sort of thinking. Arnold J. Toynbee did have something like that - IIRC, he believed that cultures from colder climates (Northern Europe, for example) were more advanced than cultures elsewhere because they had to develop technologies to deal with the harsher climate. Most modern historians/social scientists, etc., disagree with him rather strongly, but at least it was an alternative to some more racist views his contemporaries were spewing.
What Diamond does is explain why certain cultures - namely, those from the entire Eurasia super-continent - had a major leg-up over cultures elsewhere. The answer turns out to be that Eurasia had greater access to domesticatable crops and animals, plus Eurasia's major axis is east-west, which made diffusion of crops much easier than in the Americas or Africa, whose major axes are north-south. This allowed civilization (defined as a city-building culture, which in turn implies a society that can produce enough food surplus to support a non-food producing urban elite) to develop sooner and spread faster in Eurasia than on other continents. Diamond's account is a lot more plausible than Toynbee's.
However, Diamond's theory is not sufficient to explain the modern-day diffusion of the notion of the separation of church and state or democracy. For that, you have to look at how the concepts developed historically. I would suggest looking at the Thirty Years War and the revolution in military affairs caused by the development of firearms.
Actually, IIRC, the (pre-Christian) Romans had a bit of ulterior motive in providing for local autonomy in religious matters - namely, they didn't want to piss off the local gods. One of the reasons that Christians were persecuted against is that Christian soldiers wouldn't worship the local gods, which the other soldiers saw as bad luck.
I'm afraid I don't have any sources for this, this is just something I heard somewhere.
The GP mentioned users who *visted* the Wikipedia, not edited, but editing might be more incriminating as well as easier to track. Tracking down the IP address would be the easiest way to do such snooping automagically, but there are probably clues to be gleaned from the information the contributor adds to the 'pedia themselves...
A thought occurs - the Wikipedia is a fairly well known site, like CNN, New York Times, etc. Unlike many blocked and well known news and politics sites, the content is created by the users. If the Wikipedia is blocked by the PRC, then the Chinese langauge version is being edited by Chinese speakers (or writer, rather) from outside of the PRC, and those in the PRC that have managed to break through the Great Firewall. The resulting content would probably not be too favorable to the PRC.
Unblocking the Wikipedia would allow PRC loyalists to edit, improving the PRC's image, as well as providing the government an opportunity to conduct "counter-intelligence" on those who aren't so loyal.
Yep, that is true. But until, what, the 19th century?, Christians were even worse. Jews migrated to Muslim areas where they could live in peace.
Well, AFAICT, it goes back before Israel, but not before the Zionist movement. It started a bit after WWI. Before WWI, you had some Zionists moving to Palestine. They'd buy their land fair and square off of some absentee landlords who lived in Damascus, and, on the whole, they seem to have gotten on well with the locals. After WWI, though, there was a major influx of Zionists from Europe, and these new guys didn't know the lay of the land as well as the old hands. The main sticking point was the olive trees.
You see, you have these olive trees in Israel/Palestine. They can produce fruit for thousands of years, so they are really quite valuable. Because they are so valuable, the landlords in Damascus owned the land, but the local Palestinians owned the actual olive trees. The new arrivals didn't know this. The olive trees were in the way. So the noobs cut them down. Things kinda spiralled downward after that...
The game does look kinda cool. Wish I had time to play it.
Again, NK doesn't need nukes to completely ruin South Korea's day. The main targets for these nukes are Japan and, if they can, the US (San Francisco). By the time we mobilize to bomb them (assuming we don't do a pre-emptive strike), there will hardly be any targets in South Korea worth nuking. Well, maybe in the southern part, I don't know... (Come on, this is slashdot, I'm talking out my nether regions here.) Given that North Korea can't have more of a handful of nukes, I'd would say that they would committ them all in the initial attack. They probably have the launch facilities to get them all into the air (or at least explode on the launch pad), but given the reliability of the NK's missles, they might not all get to the target.
So, after the initial attack, we'll be dealing with conventional weapons. Going across the DMZ will be a bit tough. Somebody mentioned an amphib assault, but North Korea does have a respectable submarine fleet. On the other hand, their air force is a joke. With in a very short time, we will own the air to the point where a "fighter bomber with a one way ticket" is going to have a hard time getting off the ground. Air power alone won't be enough to win the war, but it will at least keep the North Koreans pre-occupied while we work on the ground war. As for the ground war, well, to put it bluntly, just about any problem is shallow if you throw enough resources (i.e. bodies) at it, and we will also have help from the Chinese. The only question in my mind is that, if this plays out, if we will need to go to a draft, or if our standing forces can handle it before the draftees can mobilize.
As for North Korea being nuts, well, there's nuts and then there's nuts. It's pretty clear that Kim wants nukes as a deterrent against an American invasion, and also to show that he's a world-class player too. If he actually uses them, he's toast. End of problem. The most scary thing is if he sells them to someone else, but given that he probably doesn't have too many of them, he probably won't want to.